I’m actually looking forward to this app, it sounds like a very good fit for my usage, always wanting more pro editing tools than iPhoto but simpler library management than Aperture and better iOS integration than Lightroom.

Most of my photo editing these days is done on pixelmator, which works great, but I’m looking forward to trying out Photos when it comes out.

Therefore, three months after I bought an iPad Air 2 and three years into my iPad-as-a-computer experiment, I’d like to offer some thoughts on my current iPad setup and how the device has changed my computing habits.

Because not only do I know what the iPad is good for in my life – the iPad Air 2 finally let me replace my aging MacBook Air as my main computer.

[…]

When I talk about getting work done on my iPad, I don’t mean using companion apps or otherwise having an iPad in addition to a Mac. For the past three years, I’ve been rebuilding the way I run MacStories and co-host two podcasts with an iPad-first workflow in mind. I need to find ways to be productive wherever I am because my life rhythm dictates a constant mobility, but I don’t want to produce subpar work when I’m on an iOS device. I’ve set out to replace the need for OS X in my life, and the combination of iOS 8 and the iPad Air 2 has allowed me to take this effort to the next logical step.

[…]

Apple’s challenge for the next five years of iPad is to clarify whether this device is a portable screen for specific tasks or a general computer in a portable form factor. And if it can excel in both scenarios without losing its way. Apple needs to design the iPad so that its everyday computing nature also facilitates highly specific tasks and use cases.

Amazon is reportedly in discussion with RadioShack to buy some of the company’s brick-and-mortar stores after the troubled electronics chain files for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Bloomberg says that the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is considering using the stores as showrooms for its hardware, and as pick-up and drop-off centers for items purchased online. Both Amazon and Radio Shack declined to comment on the situation, but two people apparently familiar with the matter said that Amazon may use the locations to give people a chance to try its growing range of hardware, including its range of Kindle tablets, its Fire smartphone, and its new Echo speaker.

Radio Shack has been hemorrhaging money for the past two years, and saw its shares, which had been at less than $1 since November, drop 13 percent on Monday to $0.24. The 92-year-old company was suspended from trading on the New York Stock Exchange today after it notified the exchange it did not intend to submit a business plan, a move that sees it slip further towards bankruptcy. Amazon isn’t the only company interested in the ailing RadioShack — mobile carrier Sprint has reportedly discussed purchasing between 1,300 and 2,000 of the company’s 4,000-plus US stores, and may co-brand the venues with both companies’ names.

This sounds like an interesting way for Amazon to dip its toes in retail on the cheap, but the problem is, most RadioShack locations are kind of crappy. Every location would need a lot of work just make it look nice

Do you want to know one of the beautiful things about Data McFly? It integrates really easily with other services.

In this article, we are going to walk through using Data McFly and Twilio together to build a real-time SMS call center.

This could be used as a customer help desk where customers send a text message for help and an agent sends a reply back from their web browser.

The actual phone work will be handled by Twilio, and Data McFly will store the data and display the chats in real-time. We’ll use node.js to send and receive the text messages and an HTML frontend to handle the actual chatting.

I decided this week to give myself the task of building a real-time SMS call center that used Data McFly for the data handling and real-time communication, and Twilio for the phone work.

Last night it was the State of the Union press gallery that looked like an Apple ad, and today it was Microsoft’s Windows 10 event that was resplendent in aluminum MacBooks and glowing Apple logos. Austen Allred, co-founder of Grasswire captured it on Twitter.

John Chen, in a blog post adapted from a letter he sent to several members of Congress:

Unfortunately, not all content and applications providers have embraced openness and neutrality. Unlike BlackBerry, which allows iPhone users to download and use our BBM service, Apple does not allow BlackBerry or Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging service.

Ok…

Let’s set aside the assertion that net neutrality [1] means Apple should be forced to support iMessage on BlackBerry and Android phones.

This is a really bizarre argument, being made from a company in a position of weakness: “Why won’t they share their toys?” Do you think BlackBerry would have been in a hurry to share its technology with Apple back when BlackBerry was riding high?

In fact, for years, BlackBerry was entirely against sharing their BBM app with other platforms until they started losing their footing and finally had no other choice.

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication. The term was coined by Columbia University media law professor Tim Wu in 2003 as an extension of the longstanding concept of a common carrier. (via Wikipedia) ↩

Here at MacStories we write about apps. A lot. Many of those we write about, perhaps even most, are created by individuals and small teams. And typically, those hard-working individuals remain unknown to the public who just know an app as something they use. Today we want to bring a bunch those indie developers to the forefront.

I wasn’t sure exactly where it would lead, but last month I asked on Twitter for independent developers to @ reply me and say hi. Amplified by retweets by Federico and many others, I got dozens and dozens of replies, ultimately totalling just under 200 responses. That’s both a pretty huge number (trust me, it was a time consuming process documenting them all) and also incredibly tiny (there are around 250,000 active developers and over a million apps for sale).

It would be completely ridiculous to perform any kind of analysis on such a small sample size, but it was nonetheless great to have a relatively varied spread of developers from all over the world (illustrated in the above graphic). But more valuable was the list of developers and their Twitter accounts. So I’ve created a Twitter list that includes every developer that @ replied me. We’ve also included the full table of every developer we collated, links to their apps, location and Twitter account (see below). Please note that developers and apps shown in the full list does not mean they are endorsed by me, Federico or MacStories. If a developer met some very minimal criteria, they were included.

Microsoft unveiled its plans for a free copy of Windows 10 for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users yesterday, but it looks like Windows RT is being left out in the cold.

In a statement provided to The Verge, Microsoft confirms the Surface Pro 3 and “entire Surface Pro lineup” will get the update to Windows 10, but Windows RT won’t get the full OS. “We are working on an update for Surface, which will have some of the functionality of Windows 10. More information to come,” says a Microsoft spokesperson.

This means tablets like the Surface RT and Surface 2 won’t get Windows 10.

This doesn’t come as a surprise, Just like when the Surface Pro 3 came out and the RT didn’t receive any updates, I can see the RT slowly dying a slow death with one final major update.